Secret Service looking into Ted Nugent’s rhetoric

WASHINGTON — The latest bit of ginned-up campaign outrage: Democrats are attacking former Massachusetts Gv. Mitt Romney over Ted Nugent’s declaration that should President Obama be re-elected, the rock musician “will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.”

Nugent, best known for hard-rock anthems such as “Cat Scratch Fever” and “Great White Buffalo,” endorsed Romney in March after talking to him on the phone.

On Tuesday, Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz criticized Nugent’s inflammatory remarks and claimed the rocker is a “Romney surrogate.” The DNC put out a video showing that Romney once said “it’s been fun getting to know Ted Nugent.”

Romney’s campaign released a statement later saying the candidate “believes everyone needs to be civil.”

Story continues below advertisement.

At a National Rifle Association gathering over the weekend, Nugent claimed that Obama and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. don’t “even like the Constitution.” He added that “we got four Supreme Court justices who don’t believe in the Constitution.”

And then he really got rolling.

“If you want more of those kinds of evil anti-American people in the Supreme Court, then don’t get involved and let Obama take office again,” he said to an approving crowd at the NRA convention. “Because I’ll tell you this right now: If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year. . . .

“But if you can’t go home and get everybody in your lives to clean house in this vile, evil, America-hating administration, I don’t know what you’re made of. If you can’t galvanize and promote and recruit people to vote for Mitt Romney, we’re done. We’ll be a suburb of Indonesia next year. . . .

“Our president, and attorney general, our vice president, Hillary Clinton, they’re criminals, they’re criminals. And if you take that adamant ‘we the people’ defiance, remember we’re Americans because we defied the king. We didn’t negotiate and compromise with the king, we defied the emperors. We are patriots, we are bravehearts. We need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November.”

The Secret Service acknowledged on Tuesday that it is investigating what Nugent had to say about the president and Democrats in general:

“We are aware of the incident, and we are conducting appropriate follow-up,” said Secret Service spokesman Brian Leary.